


For Rose

by parabatai



Category: Vampire Academy Series - Richelle Mead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-01 11:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6517654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parabatai/pseuds/parabatai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Rose's departure in SK, her friends are left devastated. What happens right after she leaves? How will her friends cope, and what will they do in honor of her?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Revelation Avenue  
Alberta’s point of view on the events of the Strigoi attack at the end of Shadow Kissed and a very monumental discovery…

I RUSHED down the steps of my dorm building, wielding a silver stake and gun, each tucked safely into the waistband of my black guardian slacks. After the Strigoi attack and our rescue, one could never be too careful. Sure enough, as soon as I walked out of the building, I noticed guardians milling about like bees. I’d never seen so many guardians all at one place—excluding the Royal Court. It was disorienting, really, to remember why they all were here—to replace all the guardians we had lost, and to discuss what would happen next. The events of the past few weeks had triggered animalistic response from Moroi and dhampirs worldwide, and we’d only barely managed to keep the number of angry people from bombarding the Academy. If they had their way, the royal Moroi would probably be here at the Academy, shouting at me, shouting at Kirova, shouting at one another, shouting at the novices for being not good enough, not strong enough, not smart enough, all while they sat back and shouted, not really accomplishing anything. Despite the rigorous dhampir mantra, they come first, I never really found a particular liking to most royal Moroi. They all just shouted and argued, never really seeming to grasp the situation before arguing on behalf of themselves and not their counterparts, the dhampirs.   
I sighed, wanting to just run back into my room and sink into the bed, to block out the tragedy and the darkness of sorrow that seemed to haunt the Academy. Having so many responsibilities of Head Guardian here at St. Vladimir’s was really starting to catch up to me.   
“Alberta!” someone called out. I whipped my head towards the voice, finding Kirova waving her hands anxiously. I jogged towards her and ducked my head as form of greeting.   
“Ellen,” I started off cautiously. Normally she wouldn’t have actively seeked me like this. She would’ve sent a message and I would’ve come to her office…. I found myself dwelling on life before the attack. It seemed like ages ago. But I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything normal, considering our situations.   
“I need you to ask Guardian Hathaway to talk to me,” she said, tucking a loose strand of hair away from her usually-tidy face. I noticed dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was a lot messier than its usual bun. “She hasn’t been answering her phone, and it’s pretty important.”  
I nodded. “Right away,” I complied, then walked away. I supposed it was rude to walk away like that, especially from my superior, but I guess we all were out of sorts. I headed towards the math department building, but realized that class today was canceled. I wouldn’t have to work my shift guarding this building today.  
But speaking of Hathaways and students, I had to talk to Rose. I was sure that she would be entirely out of sorts, considering her already-fragile mental state and her participation in the guarding of the elementary campus. I’d also have to take back the stake I’d given her during the attacks. Even though many of the superior Court-based guardians had looked down on me for giving a stake to a novice, I didn’t feel that slightest regret. Rose and Christian had been essential in the massacre of hundreds of Strigoi, and I was proud of their developments. Christian had showed the world how much the Moroi magic was needed in our fight against Strigoi.   
I turned to the student dorms and opened the door. Yuri was behind the counter, and he looked up as I entered.   
“Guardian Petrov,” he greeted. “Can I help you?” He looked fairly surprised to see me here, and just as well. I rarely ever came to the student wing of the school campus.   
“Call Rosemarie down for me, please,” I said, sinking down into a sofa chair to wait. Yuri nodded and picked up the phone, punching in the numbers to Rose’s dorm room. Hopefully she’d pick up the dorm phone, if she was even there.   
Yuri raised the phone to his ear, and after a few seconds, put it back down, a puzzled expression upon his face.   
“Is something wrong?” I asked, concerned. I was already beginning to imagine the worst possibility: that all the tragedy had taken her mental state beyond what was savable, that she went crazy, that she was caught in a fight with another student elsewhere. Without realizing it, my heart rate accelerated, and I clenched the arms of the chair. “Is something wrong with Rose?” I repeated, starting to get worried.   
Yuri slowly said, “The line said that the room has been deactivated.”  
Deactivated. The word played in my head before the meaning fully sank in. A dorm room only deactivated if the student living there dropped out.  
Rose had dropped out. 

 

 

 

ROSE HAD DROPPED OUT. The words hit me like a wave, and I jerked upright. “Call Vasilisa, Christian, Eddie… and Adrian please,” I said, mind swirling. Why would Rose leave? I never expected Rose, such a wise person beyond her age, to make such a rash decision. Clearly she would’ve had a very clear, important reason for her to leave. I knew she wouldn’t leave just because of the sorrow and tragedy…she’d endured Spokane. But then again, maybe this past tragedy had pushed her beyond her limits and made her go crazy, along with the effects of spirit. Whatever the case, her friends were bound to know.  
Surprised by my anxiety, Yuri viciously nodded and once again punched in several numbers into the phone. He mumbled quietly to each of them, so quiet that even my guardian ears couldn’t pick up. Or maybe I was just in shock.  
I’d known Rose since she was a baby, as a friend of Janine’s. I’d raised her for Janine while she was away, and I’d been probably the main parental figure in her life, even if she didn’t see me as that way. I probably cared for her just as much as Lissa, or even Janine herself. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t predicted her doing something like this. I couldn’t believe I didn’t try to stop her. What if it was all my fault that she’d left, and what if she got killed while she was away? I would never forgive myself.  
My thoughts were interrupted by Yuri’s voice: “They’re on their way to your office now, Alberta.”   
I gratefully nodded and headed out the door, practically running to my office. A few of the guardians still milling about gave me weird glances. I usually was the picture of calm, and in my current state, I supposed I looked odd.   
I burst into my office, surprised to see that Lissa, Christian, Eddie, and Adrian were already seated in the couch opposite my desk. Deirdre was there, too, surprisingly. Her office was two rooms down from mine, and she’d probably let them in while they were waiting for me to arrive.   
“Lissa, Christian, Eddie. Adrian. Wonderful to see you,” I said, sliding into my chair behind the desk. They nodded in greeting. All of them seemed extremely tired, and Lissa looked as if she’d just been crying—and very severely. “I’ve just received word of Rose,” I continued, looking at their faces for reaction. Christian and Eddie looked curious and puzzled, while Lissa and Adrian looked as if they were expecting this. Adrian was drunk, I could tell, but I couldn’t blame him. With all the tragedy and sorrow going on at this time, spirit users were bound to be struck very intensely.   
“I need to know the reason for Rose’s departure,” I said, clasping my hands in front of me and staring into each of their eyes. I felt like a police investigating them, and technically, I wasn’t allowed to pry Rose’s friends for her reasons. She was no longer a student at St. Vladimir’s, so I wasn’t supposed to care for her anymore. I hoped they wouldn’t realize that it was illegal to demand them to tell me about Rose.  
“Rose left?” Christian asked, bewildered. Eddie looked just as surprised, but as a guardian-in-training, he’d kept silent.   
“This morning. We know her mental health wasn’t exactly up to par, and we fear that she may have endangered herself. Deirdre, I hope you realize this. Please tell us anything that may help us find her so that we can prevent her from harming herself.”  
“No!” Lissa shouted, standing up. “You can’t search for her,” she said, this time more quietly, and it looked as if she had given up on something. “You can’t…”  
“Why?” Deirdre asked. “Last time I met up with her, she didn’t seem sick or unstable, but I know for sure that if something had gone wrong with her mind she’d want us to help her.”  
“But she’s not sick!” Lissa yelled. I was shocked. Lissa never lost her temper, but now she clearly was angry and sad and a little bit hurt.   
Deirdre looked just as exasperated and seemed like she, too was on the verge of screaming. “Then tell us why! What other reason could possibly explain her actions? If you can’t explain why she’d leave, then we will have to go on the search without your help, and that isn’t exactly what we want to do.” Deirdre apparently cared for Rose as much as I did.   
Lissa finally sat down, rubbing her thumbs against the scratchy material of her dress. Looking down, she finally admitted, “She went on a search to kill someone.”  
“And how is that something that a sane person would do?” Deirdre interjected.  
“I told you before, she is not insane!” Lissa’s eyes blazed.  
“Adrian, Christian, Eddie, would you like to say something?” Deirdre asked, in that damnably calm way of hers.  
The friends exchanged glances: Eddie and Christian confused, Adrian wary.  
“To kill a Strigoi,” Adrian specified.  
“Killing Strigoi is something she would do if she graduated anyway? Why is this one kill so essential for her?”  
Lissa, so quietly that I could barely hear, whispered, “Because it was Dimitri.” Then, louder: “It was Dimitri, okay? IT WAS DIMITRI.” She looked around, as if those three words had explained everything.   
And it had.   
I saw the realization dawn on Christian and Eddie’s faces before I realized it myself.   
It was Dimitri. And… had they been in love? It would explain everything, I thought. Yet I still denied it. How would Dimitri neglect his duty so much as to date his student? Love was unreasonable, they all said.  
And it made perfect sense. The way Dimitri had always stood up for her, when no one else did. The way he held her on the plane while she screamed, and screamed, and screamed, the expression in his eyes so broken that I almost wanted to cry myself. The way…the very way he looked at her, acted around her, had been there for her, the way I hadn’t.   
And that struck me.   
As much as I had tried, I hadn’t brought the comfort into her life that Dimitri did, and that hurt. I felt like I’d failed her and her mother.   
And now, when I should have been protecting her, loving her as Dimitri had, she was off and about, probably going to kill herself while trying to protect the one she loved.   
I admired the strength of her love.  
And I decided to follow her lead. I loved her, cared for her, so I would let her do what she needed to. She needed to do this for her love, and I would do this for her.  
“Let her be,” I said.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lissa and Christian have a very emotional discussion after it's revealed that Rose has left the Academy. Lissa tries to get Christian to understand Rose's point of view, but Christian still doesn't grasp Rose's situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh! I keep updating this work on Fanfiction, but I always forget to update here. My apologies :((  
> My username on Fanfiction is DreamingofStories, if you want to follow me there. :) Anyways, I'm two chapters behind on this site so hopefully I can post them ASAP. Enjoy this chapter! It's very short, but the next one will make up for it. :)

Chapter 2—Christian POV

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” I yelled, fists clenching. Normally, I never would have yelled at Lissa, but as her boyfriend, I felt that she seriously done one of the worst things of almost any relationship—secret keeping.   
“Why do you care so much anyways?” She countered. “It’s my life. I can control what I tell you and what I don’t, and besides, it’s Rose’s secret to tell! Not mine. Don’t you get that? Plus, you never even liked her. You only dealt with her because she was part of my life. And this is just proving it. You’re taking Rose’s leaving as a justification that I was keeping secrets! And you don’t even care about her! You ask first why I didn’t tell you, not first if she was okay? What type of a boyfriend does that?”  
“You can’t tell me what I feel, Lissa. Do you really think so lowly of me? That I wouldn’t even care about the girl who saved my butt from Strigoi so many times? I can’t believe you! I even planned a goddamn birthday party for her! Do you know how much I would do to have her back, safe? She wasn’t just your friend, Liss. Maybe you don’t know this, but friends are people who keep the ones they love safe, not let them run off to some fucking suicide mission!”  
“Friends are ones who respect their friends’ decisions and choices,” she said, tears in her eyes. Her voice had dropped down to a hoarse whisper, and mascara was running down her face in a black stream.  
“I do respect it! But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have let her go without a fight! Without trying to convince her! All you did was sit back and let her go do whatever she wanted; even if you claim you’re respecting her. It’s a suicide mission, Liss. Why didn’t you tell her it wasn’t worth it just to try and save some mentor guy that taught her, when she was risking her own life? If she really knew what loss is like, why didn’t she think of us? Why didn’t she think of how we’d feel if she died, or turned?”  
“Wouldn’t you do it for me?” Lissa asked simply.  
“That’s not the same th—”  
“I know Rose would let me do it for you, and God knows how much I’d be willing to do that for you.”  
My eyes teared up and I looked at the ceiling, praying they wouldn’t fall. There went my masculinity.   
“I know Rose would let you go because she would have gone with you. I know her. I know she would have gone with you, and that would be okay, because she’s meant to protect you. That’s who she is. But you let her go by herself on a suicide mission and that’s what’s not okay!”  
Lissa looked shocked. A sense of doom, or realization, passed across her face and I immediately regretted my words.   
“Gone…with her?” Lissa whispered. I wasn’t sure if she meant that she hadn’t thought of it, or that she was horrified that I’d suggested such a thing, but either way, the anger sparked in me again.   
“So what are you telling me now, Liss? You couldn’t care to think of that? You wouldn’t have gone with her? That’s the least you could have done. The best option that you should have done was still to not let her go off on the suicide mission, but the least you could have done was go with her to save her stupid celebrity crush. I can only imagine how she feels. She’d do anything for you, Lissa, anything, yet you couldn’t even help her in the tiniest of ways. I know I’d be betrayed if I were her.”  
“But wouldn’t you let her go? If you were in my position? She probably didn’t want anyone to go with her,” she said the last part with some hesitation, but continued, “because that’s the only way she could move on with her life. To kill Dimitri the Strigoi, because that’s what Dimitri the dhampir, the one she loved, wanted her to do. He would’ve done it for her. And doing it with someone else would’ve only been wrong, because, you know, sometimes things you do out of love have to be things you do alone.”  
If it hadn’t been for the situation, I would have laughed out loud. Rose had intruded on our “things you have to do out of love” plenty of times.   
Instead, I said, “But that’s because I love you as my girlfriend. Dimitri and Rose—that’s something different. Philia, not agape.”  
Lissa’s eyes widened.   
“You don’t know?” she asked. “They were in so much love! How could you not have seen that? They probably never had stupid fights like the one we’re having right now. They probably had love stronger than ours. I saw Rose, Christian, before she left. I saw her heart in her eyes, and I saw each and every piece of her broken heart in them. It broke me, Christian, you don’t know. I know philia better than anyone else, and what they had was definitely more than that. Her broken heart broke my own, and it crippled me to think that I couldn’t have stopped it. That I couldn’t have helped her, couldn’t have realized it earlier, that I was the one who kept them apart.” Her voice was agony. “And it was the least I could do to let her do what she wanted. It was the only thing I could do to make up for all that I’d done to hurt her. She told me herself that she was tired of protecting me and doing things for me when she wanted to put herself first, and this was the only thing I could do to let her put herself first. Asking her to stay would only be selfish, and imagine her hatred for me if I made her stay. That’s something I’d never be able to bear.”  
“Oh, Liss,” I sighed. Her knees were trembling, far worse than I’d ever seen, even in her spirit-mad states.   
And seeing her agony, realizing the strong bond between the two of them—and not just mentally—made me understand. Not that I’d ever be able to understand, or experience that much philia, but I understood why Lissa let her go. Why Alberta did. And most importantly, why Rose did what she did.  
Out of agape.   
And then now, the least I could do for Rose, was to protect Lissa as much as Rose had while she was gone.

For you, Rose, I thought.


End file.
